When looking at some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, people often beat their breasts about the slighting of Christopher Marlowe. “He invented it ALL!” they cry, “Shakespeare was just a talented thief!” “If only Marlowe hadn’t died so young, he’s the one we’d be studying, not that hack Will.” Okay, maybe I am overstating the case, but Shakespeare backlash has often been closely tied to support for Chris Marlowe. Yet he, like all playwrights from the Elizabethan-Jacobean period, is always compared to The Bard, the de facto barometer for British playwriting.

Seattle Repertory Theatre’s new production, Swansong, takes this notion in a slightly different direction. Rather than imagining a rivalry/camaraderie between Shakespeare and Marlowe, it instead focuses on one between Shakespeare and his younger contemporary, Ben Jonson. Jonson, who came to prominence late in Shakespeare’s career, was a court favorite who wrote many popular plays, including his seminal comedy of humours, Volpone. Yet, in posterity, he has not enjoyed nearly the acclaim as Will has. His plays have been appreciated more by scholars than by audiences, and have the reputation for being “respectable” (often translatable as “dry” or “out-of-date”). Still, Jonson redefined comedy for the Jacobean period and his plays are deserving of the kind of “rediscovery” that Marlowe’s works have enjoyed. Perhaps that is the point of plays like Swansong. In creating historical fiction about Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, they help highlight talents who might have been overlooked by the historical and literary juggernaut that is Shakespeare.